


Categorization

by HerenorThereNearnorFar



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Davenport-centric, Gen, The Stolen Century: Year Zero
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 18:05:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10622259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerenorThereNearnorFar/pseuds/HerenorThereNearnorFar
Summary: "Elves are like cats," she'd said, "dangerous and fickle, but clever as well. You can't take them for granted, but once you know how they work they aren't too difficult to deal with. Humans are like dogs. Big and dangerous, but also loyal and simple-minded."Young Davenport had been of an inquiring mind, so he'd asked what gnomes were like."Birds," his mother had told him, bouncing him gently. "Pretty, but fragile. That's why we have to be smart, little one."





	

Andreusius Delmarv Davenport Goodboy had always listened to his mother. He hadn't always agreed with what she'd said, but he'd listened.

When he'd been little boy traders had come to their village and she'd sat him on her knee next to her workbench and told in, very seriously, that it was important to remember certain things about the big folk. They weren't hard to get along with, she intimated, as long as you knew what you were dealing with. 

"Elves are like cats," she'd said, "dangerous and fickle, but clever as well. You can't take them for granted, but once you know how they work they aren't too difficult to deal with. Humans are like dogs. Big and dangerous, but also loyal and simple-minded."

Young Davenport had been of an inquiring mind, so he'd asked what gnomes were like. 

"Birds," his mother had told him, bouncing him gently. "Pretty, but fragile. That's why we have to be smart, little one." Davenport had nodded gravely and then gone back to playing with his blocks. If he tried, he was certain he could make a tower that reached the ceiling, and maybe even beyond. 

 

 

In hindsight her solemn declaration had been a little bit racist. Davenport would have definitely had to write her up if she'd been one of his officers. The mantra had served him well over the years though. Sometimes even the most unfair of stereotypes could be useful for gauging how the world worked, or at least how it was perceived. He'd dealt with plenty of cunning humans and elves who were predictable as trains, but they tended to be outliers. The divide of mortality and the insistent pull of culture meant that the rule held true more often than it didn't. At the end of the day, people wanted elves to be brilliant and humans to be strong and gnomes to helpful but unimportant. 

Davenport had been fighting those assumptions for most of his life, but the rest of his crew seemed to take to their assigned roles with aplomb. 

The twins Taako and Lup were prickly and willful and strange, always on the prowl for new mischief to create or lounging about, seemingly without a care in the world. They had more inside jokes than the IPRE accounting department, they always managed to simultaneously curl up together and take up an entire couch, and they combed each other's hair in the middle of staff meetings. They were magicians par excellence, and more than capable of handling the mission, but they also tended to torment interns who wandered too close to them. Once Magnus had pulled Lup's ear on accident and she'd bitten him. 

Magnus, for his part, wasn't letting down the team either. Davenport had watched him in class at the academy, when they'd still been weeding out candidates from the shrinking pool of potential explorers. He'd spent an hour throwing javelins at targets and then retrieving them. He was a good young man; arrogant but always willing to help those weaker than him. According to his file, he'd helped Bluejeans through a lot of the physical examinations and taken care of a family of ducks who lived on the edge of campus. Kindness wasn't technically required on a trip to the edges of reality, but Davenport had made it clear that he preferred a crew he wouldn't want to strangle after two months. And at least on the outside, Burnsides fit the bill. Strong, not even a passing acquaintance with fear, a willingness to get his hands dirty, and a firm protectiveness that would serve the crew well if they encountered any hostile forces. 

He was just... extremely Magnus. His laughs were loud, he talked over people, he was so tall he had to tuck his chin into his chest to look at Davenport. His enthusiasm knew no bounds, and neither did his pride. Gnomes were not known for keeping pets larger than them, but Davenport had spent most of his adult life in the big cities, surrounded by people who didn't have to worry about being crushed to death by a Dalmatian. He'd met plenty of hunting dogs and big sheep-herding behemoths who came down from the mountains on market days. Try as he might it was hard to take Magnus seriously when he tilted his head like old Professor Killskull's poodle did when he was confused. 

It wasn't that Davenport was stereotyping his crew, exactly. It wasn't their fault that they were stereotypical. A connection once made was hard to unsee though, and it made conversations with them somewhat awkward when they were at their wildest. It was some small consolation that Taako couldn't stop making short jokes (he didn't even seem to be trying, they just _happened_ ) and Magnus kept helpfully trying to find him step stools to stand on. Turn around was fair play, after all. 

Bluejeans was somewhat better than his peers, somewhat meaning that he trailed after Lup and Magnus down the hallways, but at least managed to look a bit embarrassed about it. Poor boy. He was brilliant as a diamond and incredibly softhearted, and he could be talked into anything. He was allergic to milk and Taako had still gotten him to chug half a gallon in the cafeteria once. If there was one thing Davenport had learned in his years at the Institute, it was that even geniuses could be very dumb sometimes. 

In fact, the only real standout from the crowd was Lucretia. It was probably the first time she'd stood out from the crowd at anything. She had a fading sort of personality, like a wilting rose. Attention made her stammer. She was shy and smart and had a selection of skills Davenport had previously never considered as things human beings could do. She took ambidexterity to new and unforeseen heights. Unlike Burnsides and Bluejeans, she didn't have the same upbeat honesty about her. Instead she looked at the world like it was a puzzle to be solved.   
  
Davenport would have enjoyed her company anyways, but it was especially delightful after a full day of dealing with the rest of his team. Lucretia was hard to get a read on, and that was always something to be appreciated. 

It was also something to be protected. Sometimes he worried her crewmates were a bad influence on her. 

 

 

After the bar and the fight and the broken bottles, Davenport walked with Merle back to the Institute and tried to ignore the fact that Taako and Lup had two pairs of shoes they hadn't entered the bar with. Ahead of them Barry and Magnus seemed to be trying to coax Lucretia into singing a folk song with them. They needed three to get a good round going, they claimed. 

"Do you think she needs help?" he asked, nervously. Sometimes it was hard to judge where the lines were with humans. Different people had different boundaries, and he sense that Lucretia's were a little tighter than Magnus realized. 

Merle gave the trio- and Taako and Lup who had joined them- a long look, then shook his head. "Nah. Sometimes you've just got to let the kids figure it out on their own. They'll have to at some point, s'not like you can keep an eye on them twenty four seven for the next eight weeks. Besides, she's a braver girl that you know."

He was probably right. Merle often was, in his own strange way. He said bizarre things, but there was always a grain of truth to them. 

(Davenport couldn't quite remember what dwarves had been equated to in his mother's long-winded, generalizing metaphors. Hamsters, perhaps, stubborn and sturdy, or maybe mice. Either way, Merle fit the down-to-earth mold if you squinted enough, and, maybe closed one eye.)

Davenport nodded, and let himself fall back a little more so he could think. He liked Merle, but he was still a new hire and Davenport couldn't show weakness to the first reassuringly adult face in his general vicinity. He needed to be better than that. 

Laugher broke out from the huddled group in front of him as it made it's meandering, tipsy way down the street. HR would have their hides for this but every leader knew you had to give some leeway before you ran out of room for it. The Starblaster had no alcohol, best for them to get it out of their system now. 

Lucretia had her books tucked under her arm and was trying to dodge Lup's friendly attempts to tousle her hair. Magnus temporarily left the task of tickling Taako to make a grab for her, but she evaded it handily and took cover behind Merle's less agile frame. 

She was smart, and not just in the ways the Institute had realized. Davenport knew steadily ticking, quiet intelligence when he saw it, the sort of smarts that didn't show their hand until it was needed. 

His mother would have called her practically a gnome because that was how she'd always dealt with things that had fallen outside of her neat boxes, she'd simply moved them to another one. Davenport wasn't prepared to go that far however he was glad to see stereotypes bucked once in a while. It made him feel a little more confident in his own abilities. They would all need to be so much more than they were expected to be, if this mission was to be a success. 

Fragile though they were, he could feel it in his bones. 


End file.
